Hybrid (Multistage) Decoding of Low-density Parity-check Codes

Pirouz Zarrinkhat

Pirouz Zarrinkhat, Amir H. Banihashemi, Hua Xiao

Kai Yang, J. Feldman, Xiaodong Wang

We consider the decoding problem for low-density parity-check codes, and apply nonlinear programming methods. This extends previous work using linear programming (LP) to decode linear block codes. First, a multistage LP decoder based on the branch-and-bound method is proposed. This decoder makes use of the maximum-likelihood-certificate property of the LP decoder to refine the results when an error is reported. Second, we transform the original LP decoding formulation into a box-constrained quadratic programming form. Efficient linear-time parallel and serial decoding algorithms are proposed and their convergence properties are investigated. Extensive simulation studies are performed to assess the performance of the proposed decoders. It is seen that the proposed multistage LP decoder outperforms the conventional sum-product (SP) decoder considerably for low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with short to medium block length. The proposed box-constrained quadratic programming decoder has less complexity than the SP decoder and yields much better performance for LDPC codes with regular structure

Junho Cho

Haifeng Yuan, M.A. Armand

A doubly multistage decoder (DMD) for low-density parity-check codes over ℤ2m, m>1, which fuses the multistage decoding approaches of Armand et al. and Varnica et al., is proposed. Two variants of the DMD are considered. The first (respectively, second) performs belief-propagation (BP) [respectively, offset min-sum (OMS)] decoding in each decoding stage and is referred to as DMD - BP (respectively, DMD - OMS). For the moderate-length codes considered in this study, the computer simulations show the DMD - BP (respectively, DMD - OMS) achieving coding gains of up to 0.43 dB (respectively, 0.67 dB) over standard BP decoding at a bit error rate of 10−6 on an additive-white-Gaussian-noise channel, while requiring significantly less computational power. Remarkably, DMD - OMS outperforms DMD - BP, yet has lower computational complexity than DMD - BP. Snapshots of the log-likelihood ratio densities of the decoded bits midway through the decoding process explain the superiority of the DMD over standard BP decoding.

李铁楠, 单秀玲